Reflections on the Christian journey based on the lectionary gospel texts

Saturday, 26 May 2012

Pentecost 2012

Pentecost (in Hebrew Shavuot) was an
agricultural festival during which the first fruits of the harvest were brought
to the Temple. Pentecost comes from the fact that there are seven full weeks,
49 days, from the second day of Passover to the day before Shavuot. The 50th
day is Pentecost (fiftieth). The festival is associated with the giving of the
Law, the Torah at Mount Sinai.

So since it was the day of Pentecost,
they were all together, suddenly unexpectedly
there was a sound of a roaring sea, a wind-like, vibrating. !t filled the room,
possibly somewhere in the temple precinct where they were sitting. They saw
fire shaped like tongues separated on each of the disciples. The Spirit came on
each one of them, all of them were filled, realizing 1:5 "will be
baptized." They began to speak out aloud, forcefully in other tongues-
ecstatic prophecy.

There were staying in the area
God-fearing Jews possibly Jewish pilgrims from the Roman provinces visiting
Jerusalem for the festival. When they heard the disciples they were shocked at
hearing their own language. “Galileans”, they said- What identified them as Galileans? Their
accent, which meant it carried over into the tongues. Then there is a list of
countries and races present representing the Jewish diasporia. There were
visitors from Rome both Jews and converts to Judaism temporarily resident in
Jerusalem. “We hear them declaring the wonders of God” they said. They were
puzzled, shocked and they asked one another “What does this mean?” Some people
made fun of them, ridiculing, sneering. “They have had too much
wine!”

So for Jews Pentecost meant the birth
of Judaism, for Christians it means the birth of the Church.

So who were filled with the Holy
Spirit? Luke says in Acts chapter 1

"...all these were constantly
devoting themselves to prayer, together with certain women, including Mary the
mother of Jesus, as well as his brothers."

Luke goes on to describe a crowd of
one hundred and twenty people who he calls "brothers" and addresses
as "male brothers" (the NRSV says "believers" and
"friends"). At first impression it would seem as if the crowd was
constituted only by males, but this is not so as women were mentioned as part of the
group. That Luke meant both men and women being baptized by the Holy Spirit is
made clear not only by 2:1, where it says that the day of Pentecost "they
were all together in one place," but also by quoting the prophecy of Joel
who talks about an indiscriminate pouring of the Spirit upon "all
flesh…sons and daughters…young men…old men…slaves, both men and women…"
(2:17-18). Therefore, those who received the Holy Spirit were every one of the
one hundred and twenty gathered together in the upper room.

What exactly happened? Wind and fire,
two of the natural elements of the ancient world’s cosmology, are mentioned.
Fire is often associated in the Old Testament with the divine presence (Ex
19:18; Is 66:15-16). Wind is described as one of the instruments through which
God acts (Gen 2:7; Ex 14:21). The sound of the wind was only heard by those
gathered in the house. What the crowd heard was not the sound of the wind but
the sound of the voices speaking in tongues. The tongues here are not the
ecstatic speech of the Corinthian church, a kind of spiritual language. Here it
refers to actual languages. This was so important to Luke that he mentions it
three times in seven verses. For
him this is the beginning of the fulfillment of the promise that they would be
Jesus’ witnesses to the entire world. Here they are, in Jerusalem,
but the church will rapidly move into Judea, Samaria, and eventually, the whole
of the known world, the ends of the earth.

Why Peter’s speech and the quotation
from the book of Joel? The speech is a response to the
accusation that they were drunk. Peter says that they were not filled with
wine, but with the Spirit, as the prophet Joel had promised. For Luke the
outpouring of the Spirit demonstrated the re-establishment of the prophetic
role, which was believed to have been discontinued after the last great
prophet, Malachi, had spoken. The New Testament is consistent in affirming at
the beginning with Jesus’ ministry the heavens had opened again and the Spirit of
God was empowering people once more (cf. Mk 1:9-11; 9:2-8; Acts 2:1-4; 7:56).

The quote from Joel reinforces Luke’s
understanding of the early church as a community where, at least ideally,
distinctions of gender, ethnicity, and social status were erased. From the
point of view of God's plan of salvation, all were equal before God.

So Pentecost is the bedrock of
Christian mission. Paul understood the implications of Pentecost and was
prepared to stake his reputation on what Pentecost stood for. The effect of the
gospel, Paul affirms, was to de-stigmatize people: Jews, gentiles, barbarians,
women all now stand on an equal footing under God. Paul had not suspected that
God was like that. His theological studies had told him that God was loving and
merciful; but he had thought this love and mercy were expressed once and for
all in the arrangements He had made for Israel's blessedness alone-'the plan of
salvation.'

Christian missionaries have assumed
that since all cultures and languages are lawful in God's eyes, the rendering
of God's word into those languages and cultures is necessary. More than 1,800
languages have been employed in translating the Scriptures. There is hardly any
language that does not have some portion of Christian materials available in
translation recently Gullah language in the islands off the Carolina coast
or the Native Americans.

Without the Spirit we are like board
members of British Gas. It is the Spirit that marks us out, inspires us and
gives us that 5th dimension. It is the Spirit that gives life to the
churches and without it we are like hollow shells (white anted). So pray for
the Spirit. We need it!